Midnight in Europe: A Novel

by Alan Furst

  She met his eyes and said, “I can never thank you enough … you didn’t have to …”

  “It needed to be done, Dalia, so I did it.”

  “You put yourself in danger.”

  “Well, that’s over now, all I have to do tonight is get back to the Florida.” He left the attic a few minutes later and took a shortcut through an alley to get to the hotel.

  In the sub-basement of the Palace Hotel, Castillo waited at the end of a long line of men and women, shadowy forms in the light of two candles at either end of a table. Seated at the table was a man in civilian clothing and eyeglasses, who the sentry had called the officer. The line had moved slowly, but now it sped up—the officer sent the next few men away after a glance at their papers. He’d evidently been doing this kind of work for some time and had thus become good at it, thoroughly efficient. Castillo was now next in line for interrogation. Standing at the table, a handsome young man was explaining something at length, leaning over and speaking confidentially, so Castillo could not hear the words. But the tone, the high pitch of the voice, imploring, whining—that he could hear. Then the officer signaled—raised his hand—that he’d heard enough, and the young man cut himself off in mid-sentence and stood straight and silent, as though to receive a judgment.

  On the table was a bell, an inverted silver cup with a silver button on top, the sort of bell one saw on the front desk of a hotel, used to summon a porter to take baggage up to a room. The officer extended one hand, hesitated, then tapped on the bell, a single, hollow clink. It was apparently an old bell. Or perhaps not so old, maybe just worn out. At the sound of the bell, a giant of a man with a huge beard and small, crafty eyes brushed past Castillo on his way to the table. As he went by, Castillo smelled rotten onions. The giant took the young man by the crook of the elbow, whispered something in his ear, then led him away. He had, Castillo now saw, a large revolver thrust into the waistband of his trousers.

  As Castillo waited for the officer’s permission to approach the table—this was done palm up, with a come here motion of the index finger—the sentry appeared and placed the Cruz passport and permits on the table. The officer was in no hurry, held the passport near one of the candles so he could read the typed print. From somewhere above the sub-basement, perhaps just outside the service entry, came the sound of a single pistol shot. The officer seemed not to notice. When he finished reading, he put the documents aside and looked up at Castillo. “Comrade Cruz?” he said.

  “Yes.” Castillo had caught himself just in time—he’d almost added sir to the yes. The officer was younger than Castillo had realized, perhaps in his late twenties. His suit was made of cheap material, his eyeglasses had steel frames.

  “You are well dressed, aren’t you,” the officer said. Then, “Where are you staying in Madrid?”

  “At the Hotel Florida.”

  “And your business here?”

  “My mother is ill and cannot get the medicine she needs here in Madrid, so I brought it up from Valencia.”

  “Would your mother not be better off in Valencia too?”

  “She will not leave. She has lived all her life in Madrid and she is passionate for La Causa. She cannot fight on the battle lines but, by staying here, she fights.”

  “And you? Are you also passionate for La Causa?”

  “I am, but to earn money I must live in Valencia.”

  The officer slid a wooden box in front of him. The box might once have been used by a library—a yellowed card in the brass case on the front of the box said RIV–STO—but it now held three-by-five index cards. The officer flipped through the cards until he found the C names, then said, “You’re not Alberto Cruz, are you?”

  “No, I am Carlos.”

  “Very well, Comrade Carlos, give me your overcoat, then put everything in your pockets on the table.”

  Castillo did as he was told. When his things were laid out before him, he saw that the officer had turned his overcoat inside out. “What a shame,” the officer said. “You seem to have ripped the lining of your coat. No, no, I am mistaken, the lining has been cut open.” He stared at Castillo, then said, “Is there something you would like to tell me? To unburden yourself?”

  “It was like that when I bought it.”

  “Oh, of course it was.”

  When the officer tapped the bell, Castillo’s legs began to tremble. He feared he might collapse and thought, God, help me to stand up. An older woman with white hair in a bun stood next in line behind Castillo and, at the sound of the bell, Castillo heard her gasp. The giant finally appeared and as he took Castillo by the crook of the elbow the smell of rotten onions was overpowering. Leaning over, the giant whispered by Castillo’s ear: “Be a man.”

  He led Castillo up the two flights of stairs, then out the service entry. A few feet away, the handsome young man lay dead. He’d fallen forward, but Castillo could see his face.

  The giant said, “On your knees, comrade.”

  Castillo’s last thought was the name of a lover from long ago.

  Paris, 22 December, 1937. Cristián Ferrar, on his way home from the Coudert Frères law firm, stopped at the boulangerie on the tiny rue Grégoire de Tours and picked up a baguette for his dinner. Next, at the grocery store across the street, he bought a thick slice of orange Mimolette cheese, a garlic sausage, a tin of artichoke hearts, and a bottle of grocery-store Bordeaux. As the woman who kept the store wrapped it all in a sheet of newspaper—the right-wing Le Journal, he saw—she made a face, a sour mix of anger and disgust. “Have you heard, monsieur?” she said. “The Métro workers say they will strike on Christmas Day—for a week.”

  “I suspect they’ll get a new contract. Just in time, as usual.”

  “Imagine, monsieur, Christmas.”

  “Will you have to close the store?”

  “Oh no, I don’t live far away. But still …”

  “Then it won’t be so bad.”

  “Bad enough. Bonsoir, monsieur. Try to stay warm.”

  “Bonsoir, madame.”

  He set off toward home, tearing an end off the baguette and eating as he walked. It was cold. Cold and damp with a cutting little wind; a Paris specialty, a diabolical weather that forced its way through your clothing and chilled your very soul. Ferrar shivered and walked faster, entering the Place Saint-Sulpice, heading past the church of Saint-Sulpice toward his apartment. His refuge, where he looked forward to a quiet evening: he had a good chair in the room he used as a study, would settle by the coal-burning fireplace, would read—Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana—drink the bottle of wine, and smoke Gitanes, a blanket pulled tight around his shoulders.

  He’d grown up in rooms where you could hear clocks.

  The rhythmic ticking created a special silence, a hush, which was the perfect setting for the life of the Ferrar family. His father was a lost soul, an excessively gentle and reticent man dedicated to philately, stamp collecting. In Ferrar’s memory of him during the family’s time in Barcelona—the first twelve years of Ferrar’s life—his father was seated at a desk in his study, bending over a leather album, with some stamp, from Bechuanaland or Fiji, worth three somethings, quivering in a tweezers as he tried to slip his prize into a glassine envelope.

  Ferrar’s mother was, in a way, not dissimilar. Daily existence was always hard—when she tried to correct the maid, the maid didn’t hear her. She loved her children—Ferrar, a pious older sister, and two younger brothers, hellions both—but she couldn’t discipline them. Faced with disruption of any kind she was meek, and helpless. But Ferrar’s mother, like his father, had a singular obsession: she believed that her family, named Obrero, was of noble origin, a tiny leaf clinging to a dying branch of the extinct Bourbon-Braganza royal line. Extinct it might be, according to the Almanach de Gotha, but there was a sprinkling of Spanish dukes who continued to use the title, and to them she wrote letters.

  Not that they were ever answered, but they were meticulously composed—Ferrar’s saintly sister helped—s
o that, perhaps, some day … Señora Ferrar’s hopes were based on a yellowed packet of letters, tied with a faded ribbon, left to her by a great-aunt. The letters concerned a certain Spanish duchess, descended from Mariana Victoria, Infanta of Portugal, who sometime in the eighteenth century had been wed, in an arranged marriage, to an Italian count. He was three, she was forty-six, and from this marriage there was no issue. But, said the great-aunt’s letters, the duchess had, in her intemperate youth, been secretly married, and produced a daughter; an ancestor of Señora Ferrar.

  Meanwhile, someone had to run this amiably mad family and that someone was Señora Ferrar’s mother, Ferrar’s grandmother, his beloved Abuela—the Spanish version of Nana—who made sure that practical matters were attended to, and kept the family from disaster. She had always lived with them and, now seventy-seven, continued to do so, ruling the house in Louveciennes, just up the Seine from Paris, where Ferrar’s parents, sister, and a stray cousin all resided. And it was Abuela who made the great decision of Ferrar’s life: “We must go away,” she said to the family at the dinner table. “If we stay in Spain, there will be tragedy.” And so they went: night train to Paris, lives as émigrés.

  In Barcelona, the last week of July is remembered as the Semana Trágica, the Tragic Week, and commemorates riots, set off by the army’s failed adventure in Morocco in 1909, and the subsequent conscription into the army of Catalonian workers. Mobs ruled the city, fifty churches were burned down, and over two hundred people were shot in the repression that followed. Ferrar’s father, then a young man, having graduated from Spain’s majestic university at Salamanca, had been encouraged by friends to take up a junior position at the Ministry of Justice. When the rioting broke out in 1909, the head of the ministry had fled for his life—the anarchist rioters disliked his politics and meant to kill him. Deprived of this pleasure, they went after his subordinates. On the night of 10 July, with gunfire echoing through the streets, blood was smeared on the door of the Ferrar house. Abuela made her pronouncement over dinner and nobody disagreed. It had become dangerous to live in the city and, Abuela decreed, in Spain: they would leave, or they would die.

  Two days later they left for Paris. Ferrar, twelve at the time, would never forget that journey: this rupture in the family life had frozen them into silence. Nobody said a word, their minds occupied by the refugees’ litany: Where will we live? How shall we survive? What will become of us? In time, these questions were answered as the family adapted as best they could. After an intensive three-week study of French, Cristián Ferrar was enrolled at the Lycée Charlemagne, near the Saint-Paul Métro station.

  Three weeks? This change of existence, brought on by catastrophe, was the first step in Ferrar’s future success. The eldest son of the family had always been considered smart: he was a good student—the Jesuit teaching brothers thought well of him, he could answer all sorts of dinner-table questions, he was an avid reader; a smart young man. Meanwhile, Abuela used the word brilliant, but she was a grandmother and what grandmother wasn’t proud of her grandson? In fact, Ferrar had been born gifted, was exceptionally intelligent, and his teachers at the Lycée Charlemagne took special interest in him.

  Ten years later, by the time he received his degree from the Faculté de Droit, the law school of the Sorbonne, he could read and speak French, Italian, Portuguese—wildly difficult!—English, and German, and could manage in Roumanian and Serbo-Croatian. Among the top five in his graduating class, he was hired as an associate by Coudert Frères, the first interview in his search for a position as a lawyer. By the age of twenty-nine he was made a junior partner and, six years later, a senior partner.

  6 January, 1938. The Coudert Frères office was in a handsome old building at 52, avenue des Champs-Elysées, a prominent address for a prominent clientele. On the list of clients could be found Whitneys, Drexels, Guggenheims, Vanderbilts, Gulbenkians, Wanamakers, and many others. But the interior echoed the style of the New York office: well-aged furniture—simple wooden desks and filing cabinets, battered oak desk-chairs on wheels—and a floor that was no color beyond dark and creaked underfoot. This absence of pretension spoke well of Coudert: a long-established, honorable firm, it was said that you could sense probity, the legal version of “integrity,” when you walked through the door.

  The office of the managing partner, George Barabee, was no exception, its only decoration a group portrait of eight Coudert partners painted in 1889, ten years after the firm was established in Paris. Four seated lawyers, four standing behind them, most bewhiskered in the style of the day—thick muttonchop sideburns; full, well-tailored beards—all the subjects looking terribly stiff and dignified, a portrait genre known waggishly as a treeful of owls.

  Barabee had tousled fair hair, wore tortoiseshell eyeglasses, his body thick and broad in the way of a former athlete; he’d played football at Princeton. Graduating from the Columbia Law School in 1916, he was admitted to the New York bar, then flew fighter planes over France when the American Expeditionary Force joined the war against Germany. On the inside of his right forearm was a puckered burn scar, the result of being shot down over a cow pasture where he’d managed to land the burning Spad. He’d stayed in Paris after the war and gone to work for Coudert, in time becoming managing partner, a position that required social contact with prominent people in the city, a job he described as both his duty and his pleasure. Thus he joined clubs, went to state dinners, played squash once a week with J. J. Wilkinson, the second secretary of the American embassy.

  On the evening of the seventh, Barabee leaned back in his chair, hands clasped behind his head. It was quiet in the office—except for taxi drivers honking their horns out on the avenue—the end of the day; he was tired, he wanted to go home, he wanted a drink. But one more problem had to be dealt with and, seated across from him, Cristián Ferrar lit a cigarette and opened a file folder he’d brought to Barabee’s office.

  “What’s our history with these clients?” Barabee said.

  “In 1932 we advised the Union of Hungarian Credit Associations on a bond issue. In 1933, when Hitler came to power, one of the members, a small private bank in Budapest called First Danubian Trust, saw trouble coming in central Europe and retained us. They wanted to know if they could transfer their incorporation to France while the physical bank stayed in Budapest. We didn’t believe the French would accept that, but what we could do, and ultimately did, was create a French holding company. Thus the bank in Budapest is controlled from Paris; the holding company essentially owns it in every respect and protects it from being taken over, in case things go very wrong in the political future, by the Hungarian government.”

  “In fact, things are going wrong all over Europe. So, a small private bank—family owned, I would imagine.”

  “It is. Owned by two brothers called Polanyi—nobility, one of them is a count, a diplomat at the Hungarian legation in Paris—and a sister who married a man called Belesz.”

  “And then?”

  “One of the bank’s accounts was a large commercial hotel near the railway station in Budapest. When it became clear that the hotel was failing, First Danubian Trust decided to buy it. This was in October of ’37. But then Belesz died suddenly, a hunting accident, shot himself while climbing over a fence. His two children succeeded him, niece and nephew to the brothers, and inherited equally his share of the holding company that controls the bank.”

  “Who are the heirs?”

  “They are both in their mid-forties, the nephew interests himself in Budapest nightlife, the niece is married to a major in the Hungarian army. When the holding company was founded here, it was the owners’ direction that all the shareholders have to agree before they can do anything.”

  “Oh Lord,” Barabee said, with the sigh in his voice of one who sees it all coming. “Where is the mother in this?”

  “Belesz was divorced ten years ago, at the time of his death he was living with a nightclub dancer. So the mother is not involved, and the nephew and the nie
ce are fighting.”

  “Well, of course they are … inherit wealth and pick a fight. Which is over …?”

  “Dogs.”

  “Oh Lord, animals. The firm’s been there before, the New York office represented W. C. Fields when he was charged by the New York Humane Society with the death of a canary, ‘by torture.’ The bird flew into a painted flat during the act. Fields was acquitted. So, that said, what sort of dogs?”

  “A Hungarian breed called vizsla, they have short-hair coats, like whippets, are colored brown or rust, with rosy-brown noses. They are excellent hunting dogs and good family dogs as well. In this case there are three, inherited by the niece and nephew. He wants to sell them, she says she loves them and wants to keep them. He refused to vote on the hotel sale until she gave in, and there it sits, the partnership can’t do anything and, meanwhile, the hotel has failed and there are many creditors in court.”

  “Have Count Polanyi and his brother offered to buy the dogs?”

  “They have, but the nephew doesn’t want money, he thinks that if he refuses to vote his half share, he can drive his sister out of the partnership. It was the Count Polanyi who telephoned me this morning, told me the story, and asked if we can do anything under French law.”

  “Where are the dogs?”

  “They were at the Belesz house in Budapest, being cared for by the servants. But Count Polanyi has a castle in Hungary, and he called his steward and asked him to pick them up. So I expect they’re at the castle.”

  Barabee brooded for a moment, then rubbed his eyes and glanced at his watch. “Well …,” he said. Then, “We’ll have to come up with a list of possible legal moves, Cristián, but not until tomorrow. In here? Ten o’clock?”

  Ferrar nodded, they said good night, and Ferrar returned to his office. His secretary, Jeannette, already had her coat on but she’d been waiting for him. “Monsieur Ferrar? A telephone call came in for you a few minutes ago, a Señor Molina, from the Spanish embassy. There’s a note on your desk with the number.”